Obama diversity disappoints again

President Barack Obama completed his second Cabinet this week with a nod that might have been expected to delight women’s groups: he picked longtime supporter Penny Pritzker to serve as Secretary of Commerce, selecting yet another woman for a high-profile executive branch position.

Instead, the National Organization for Women’s response sounded a relatively ambivalent note. “Penny Pritzker Appointment is Good, But Still Not Good Enough,” the group said in its first statement. “More Women Should be in the Cabinet.”

Obama defends Cabinet criticisms

After picking an all-white, all-male slate to fill departures at key departments including State and Treasury, Obama urged critics to be patient. Given time, he promised just before his second inauguration, he’d erase concerns sparked by an entirely white and male group of top picks.

“I would just suggest that everybody kind of wait until they’ve seen all my appointments — who is in the White House staff and who is in my Cabinet — before they rush to judgment,” he said. “Until you’ve seen what my overall team looks like, it’s premature to assume that somehow we’re going backwards. We’re not going backwards, we’re going forward.”

Now the second term Cabinet is complete, with final selections that include both Pritzker and Anthony Foxx, an African American, for Transportation secretary. Still, Obama’s put together a less diverse Cabinet than in his first term, when his picks were criticized for being too white and male. And quite a few of the people Obama had asked to hold off until the picture was complete say they they’re not so sure it was worth the wait.

Diversity woes may seem an unlikely headache for the nation’s the first black president. After all, Obama has appointed two women to the Supreme Court, including the first Latino justice, and his current Cabinet choices are only slightly less diverse than in the first term — itself second only to President Bill Clinton’s “Cabinet that looks like America” in terms of representation. Just a few months ago, the president made no secret of his interest in nominating Susan Rice, an African-American woman, to succeed Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

And there’s no denying the president’s picks for some of the Cabinet’s most visible roles — such as Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel — come to their jobs after long and distinguished careers that make them logical picks for a Democratic president looking to stock his team with top talent.

But overall, there’s no denying the group he wound up with isn’t just less diverse than the current demographics of the country, and far less representative of the coalition of voters that got Obama reelected. It even falls short in virtually every category of the marks he set in his first term.

The failure of his quest to nominate Rice has resulted in an Obama Cabinet with no women serving in its top ranks — State, Defense, Justice, Treasury. With the exceptions of Valerie Jarrett, Jennifer Palmieri and Lisa Monaco, his senior advisers are nearly all white men. And so a group which had already been criticized for being too white and too male is about to become even more so.

If Foxx is confirmed, there will be three African Americans in the Cabinet, one fewer than before. The number of Asian Americans has dropped from 3 to just 1: first-term holdover Eric Shinseki, the Secretary of Veterans Affairs. And if Labor Secretary-designate Thomas Perez is confirmed, the number of Latinos will have officially made an identical slide.